Navigating the Cloud Native Ecosystem with Harness Evangelist Ravi Lachhman

The conversation covers: 

• An overview of Ravi’s role as an evangelist — an often misunderstood, but important technology enabler. 
• Balancing organizational versus individual needs when making decisions.
• Some of the core motivations that are driving cloud native migrations today. 
• Why Ravi believes it in empowering engineers to make business decisions. 
• Some of the top misconceptions about cloud native. Ravi also provides his own definition of cloud native.
• How cloud native architectures are forcing developers to “shift left.”

Links

• https://harness.io/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ravilach
• Harness community: https://community.harness.io/
• Harness Slack: https://harnesscommunity.slack.com/

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I am your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Ravi Lachhman. Ravi, I want to always start out with, first of all, saying thank you—

Ravi: Sure, excited to be here.

Emily: —and second of all, I like to have you introduce yourself, in your own words. What do you do? Where do you work?

Ravi: Yes, sure. I'm an evangelist for Harness. So, what an evangelist does, I focus on the ecosystem, and I always like the joke, I marry people with software because when people think of evangelists, they think of a televangelist. Or at least that’s what I told my mother and she believes me still. I focus on the ecosystem Harness plays in. And so, Harness is a continuous delivery as a service company. So, what that means, all of the confidence-building steps that you need to get software into production, such as approvals, test orchestration, Harness, how to do that with lots of convention, and as a service.

Emily: So, when you start your day, walk me through what you're actually doing on a typical day?

Ravi: a typical day—dude, I wish there was a typical day because we wear so many hats as a start-up here, but kind of a typical day for me and a typical day for my team, I ended up reading a lot. I probably read about two hours a day, at least during the business day. Now, for some people that might not be a lot, but for me, that's a lot. So, I'll usually catch up with a lot of technology news and news in general. They kind of see how certain things are playing out. 

So, a big fan of The New Stack big fan of InfoQ. I also like reading Hacker News for more emotional reading. The big orange angry site, I call Hacker News. And then really just interacting with the community and teams at large. So, I'm the person I used to make fun of, you know, quote-unquote, “thought leader.” I used to not understand what they do, then I became one that was like, “Oh, boy.” [laughs]. 

And so just providing guidance for some of our field teams, some of the marketing teams around the cloud-native ecosystem, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, my opinion on it. And that's pretty much it. And I get to do fun stuff like this, talking on podcasts, always excited to talk to folks and talk to the public. And then kind of just a mix of, say, making some sort of demos, or writing scaffolding code, just exploring new technologies. I'm pretty fortunate in my day to day activities.

Emily: And tell me a little bit more about marrying people with software. Are you the matchmaker? Are you the priest, what role?

Ravi: I can play all parts of the marrying lifecycle. Sometimes I'm the groom, sometimes I’m the priest. But I'm really helping folks make technical decisions. So, it’s go a joke because I get the opportunity to take a look at a wide swath of technology. And so just helping folks make technical decisions. Oh, is this new technology hot? Does this technology make sense? Does this project fatality? What do you think? I just play, kind of, masters of ceremony on folks who are making technology decisions.

Emily: What are some common decisions that you help people with, and common questions that they have?

Ravi: Lot of times it comes around common questions about technology. It's always finding rationale. Why are you leveraging a certain piece of technology? The ‘why’ question is always important. Let's say that you're a forward-thinking engineer or a forward-thinking technology leader. 

They also read a lot, and so if they come across, let's say a new hot technology, or if they're on Twitter, seeing, yeah, this particular project’s getting a lot of retweets, or they go in GitHub and see oh, this project has little stars, or forks. What does that mean? So, part of my role when talking to people is actually to kind of help slow that roll down, saying, “Hey, what’s the business rationale behind you making a change? Why do you actually want to go about leveraging a certain, let's say, technology?” 

I’m just taking more of a generic approach, saying, “Hey, what’s the shiny penny today might not be the shiny penny tomorrow.” And also just providing some sort of guidance like, “Hey, let's take a look at project vitality. Let's take a look at some other metrics that projects have, like defect close ratio—you know, how often it's updates happening, what's your security posture?” And so just walking through a more, I would say the non-fun tasks or non-functional tasks, and also looking about how to operationalize something like, “Hey, given you want to make sure you're maintaining innovation, and making sure that you're maintaining business controls, what are some best operational practices?” You know, want to go for gold, or don't boil the ocean, it’s helping people make decisive decisions.

Emily: What do you see as sort of the common threads that connect to the conversations that you have?

Ravi: Yeah, so I think a lot of the common threads are usually like people say, “Oh, we have to have it. We're going to fall behind if you don't use XYZ technology.” And when you really start getting to talking to them, it's like, let’s try to line up some sort of technical debt or business problem that you have, and how about are you going to solve these particular technical challenges? It's something that, of the space I play into, which is ironic, it's the double-edged sword, I call it ‘chasing conference tech.’ So, sometimes people see a really hot project, if my team implements this, I can go speak at a conference about a certain piece of technology. 

And it's like, eh, is that a really r...